- When we think of modern American mass media, what comes to mind?

Printing presses, radio stations, TV channels, cell phone towers, the internet?

Today's guest, Dr.

Lanny Real Bird, reminds us there was a powerful, pervasive mass medium before all of that.

Plains Indian Sign Language, used across the continent for centuries.

And if you think it's no longer relevant in today's modern high-tech times, Lanny Real Bird says, think again.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle."

Dr.

Lanny Real Bird, welcome to "Wyoming Chronicle."

You're here doing a residency of sorts for a couple of days at Central Wyoming College in Riverton.

And your specialty, at least for this week, is Plains Indian Sign Language.

- That's correct.

- What's your definition of it?

- Plains Indian Sign Language is a form of communication that was historically used in the vast regions of the Northern Plains and even into Canada.

It was the medium for communication for intertribal nations and trade, commerce, even friendship and hunting and all of this commerce of building, bringing technology, like bringing in the horse, bringing in guns.

It was used in that sort of standard, even like in the fur trade, when we had people from the Hudson Bay or the English trading companies, this is what they had to use.

- You use the word medium, and that's interesting.

We still use different types of media today, and you obviously recognize and explain the connection from then to now.

Not all that different in some ways, right?

- It's almost like a language that a lot of people innately utilize naturally when you see not only indigenous people, but even people in the mainstream, they're using some sort of dramatics and movements that are quite understandable and at the core of sign language.

So what I tell the learners and the participants that it's in our DNA as humans.

So most of this motion is just a compliment of the environment and nature and our own anatomy.

- You have a PhD in education, so you know more about this than I do, but I know, I knew a baby who gestured to communicate before he spoke.

So here's what you're talking about.

Everybody communicates with their hands.

- Certainly.

- You mentioned a couple of times sports references in your talk, and I thought about that.

When people say, well, what's the use of knowing this now?

It's obsolete, it's not relevant anymore.

Not true, and sports is one of the ways I thought of it.

When we're watching a football game before the referee had a microphone, what did he do when he called a penalty?

- Yeah.

- He showed us, so from a distance, a certain common vocabulary, so to speak, that everybody understood and could recognize no matter what team they were watching, where they were from.

This continues, in a way, still today.

- It certainly is.

You reminded me of an event that happened when I was a child back in the '60s, and I just was around some of the Crow politicians that hung around with my father, and he mentioned that they were in their conversation, that Kansas City Chiefs had invited some of the Crow tribal members that used sign language, and they mixed it into their plays at that time during the '60s.

And then he was, my dad himself, he was proud that Jan Stenrood, their kicker, was an alum from the University of Montana.

If that was in the '60s, the language was stronger in the '70s, that's the Plains Indian Sign Language.

The '80s, we're beginning to look at some of the transitions of the distractions that I mentioned about the different technologies and media that seem to have taken over some of the natural learning environments of where we traditionally had facilitated our knowledge.

So like nowadays, people are looking at the phone, not only among our indigenous communities, but in urban areas, or even in, like I mentioned, agricultural settings of some of the farmers and ranchers.

People are beginning to distract from even ranching and calving and horsemanship.

- So interesting, isn't it?

We have all these new methods of communicating that you're mentioning that we all live with, including you, you have your phone here.

- Certainly.

- But we seem to communicate so much more poorly than we're used to, at least in a lot of ways.

When you'd think, at least the idea was, this will make us better communicators, I'm not sure it does, what do you think?

- That's certainly right.

I think whether, you know, oratory is a fine art that you seldom see, like in politicians with the past presidencies that, you know, we've experienced in this nation.

We don't see those, that flair and that, because they have a teleprompter, and so they're reading and it's not coming from within, it's not coming from the heart, you know, more or less.

And even among my people, they developed a constitution to take the democracy, the Chautauqua out of, you know, communication.

So we don't see these people who have these dramatic speeches.

I kind of went on a rant because I was raised by politicians, but that was an art form that, like you mentioned, that is sort of pushed off to the side because of this multimedia and teleprompters.

We don't see that somebody can motivate us, inspire us, make us feel, you know, like we can do something, you know?

- Sort of cuts both ways, someone reading a teleprompter, oftentimes it's not even that person's own words.

- Certainly.

- And the form of communication, even entertainment almost, people used to come out to hear a speech being made.

- Oh, heck yeah.

- And again, there are occasions where that happens, but it wasn't, it used to be an event.

The communicators through time, the people who could help others understand and who could be understood, always very important in any community and society.

- Yeah, they were the media, they were the people telling the information and sort of guiding on the foundations of not only indigenous nations and their protocol and their practices, but even in, you know, urban settings or, you know, like in white communities, they had people that were, even like back in historic times where they had, I guess, heralds going through town saying this is what's happening.

You know, get ready, prepare, be the, remind them to be good citizens, dress their best, you know, how to treat their children.

And that is missing because nowadays with all these distractions like the phone, people don't even have the art of knowing how to listen.

- Yeah, yeah.

Communication, it's just so foundational.

We want to be understood.

- Certainly.

- And here you're still educating people in a way that's been used, not just prehistoric, but it's ancient and survives today.

Why is it still worth knowing about, worth teaching others about?

- It is an excellent tool for communication.

That's been there all along.

Why not use what has been given to you, not only by nature, but what is already in our DNA?

Why not?

We can't distance the mechanism of our own body and deny it that there are some instincts within us that aren't maybe, you know, under the category of intelligence.

They're just natural.

And some people will be in denial that this is leaning more towards nature and not the scientific method.

You gave me a perfect example where a child used sign language to, you know, they want a bottle or they want to rest.

Those are excellent examples that it is stamped in our DNA.

And we could utilize that, I guess, that foundation, not only to teach mainstream knowledge, but indigenous knowledge.

We could use it to teach music.

We can use it to teach math, like add, subtract, multiply, divide.

- Everyone learns math or so many of us do.

One, two, three.

I mean, it comes to us.

We think of it before we've even thought of it.

- Certainly.

- It's there.

You mentioned as well as an interesting story I hope you'll share with us.

This story you told involved a hospital patient who had trouble communicating.

And I believe you were called in to assist in the world that was about as high technology as you can get yet still, because you had this knowledge.

You were able to help the physician treat the patient.

What happened?

- Okay, what we have here is that somebody who was traumatized by pain or some sickness, they were suffering.

And so sometimes some of the people that spoke the language would try to communicate with them, but the patient was having a hard time that they weren't able to respond because they were dealing with pain.

Well, one family had the idea that I might be able to come in there using sign language and tell these caretakers a little bit more information about this patient.

So I got a call and said, "Oh, all right."

I don't mind doing anything that will help.

So I just said, "These people, they send me over there to check on you."

They said, "Well, no, no, no.

If you're in pain or something, what's bothering you?"

And they're hooked up to an IV and they're having a rough time.

And they, "Ah, there's something in my gut that's bothering me."

And so I said, "Well, what he told me is that," he said, "There's something within his stomach or in his digestive area that's bothering him."

Oh, so they took a note that they were finally able to get something out of him.

And so this person over here, they wanted to know if you ate anything, can you eat?

And then they said, "I'm in too much pain."

That person, and I tell them in English, they told me that they can't eat too much because they're in too much pain.

So they told me and I tell them the circumstances, what's going on.

And I said, "That's all they wanted to know me.

I'm gonna head out.

It's good to see you.

Get up or something.

I'm going again, I'll see you."

And then that was a bit about it.

And then- - How did it work out?

Did you find out?

- Yeah, they were all right.

- This is a good example for your workshops that you do.

Doesn't happen all the time, but it's very real.

And you really performed a service there.

- At the same time, I began to realize that there were other people who had hard of hearing.

And so I started making these diagrams and flashcards and videos so that they could communicate with their hard of hearing family member.

So they're available like in Crow if they want.

- I'm glad you mentioned that because I wanted to ask you about the differences between I think what we'd refer to as American Sign Language, which seems to me exists primarily for people who have hearing loss.

As opposed to the sign language you teach, which certainly is useful for people with hearing loss, but was more of a bridge between language barriers, but still very sophisticated, adaptable, flexible, expandable.

People who sat in on your workshop today got a little sense of that.

It's used for everything, as you talked about earlier.

And they're virtually nothing really that needed to be communicated that couldn't be communicated.

- In a circumstance where there are a variety of languages, let's take, for example, Wyoming.

The people that used to live in Wyoming, like the Crow, the Shoshone, Arapaho, some people of the Dene, some of the Cheyenne, some of the Comanches, as well as Montana.

We got like 10 different tribes.

You got Pekunee, Blackfeet, Salish, Kootenai, Pend Oreille.

You got Dakota, Nakona, Cheyenne, Crow.

- And each one had its language, right?

- Each one of them had a language.

And so that when they met together, they needed a medium, like I mentioned earlier and what you explained earlier in your narrative, that this was the English that's used in the UN at that time.

We needed to communicate with signs with each other.

And we would perfectly understand what somebody said.

Like, for example, that they came over from maybe the Powder River area to come over here to meet you.

And we went across an area where there was really rapids and a lot of rocks there.

And then I think, oh, I remember that.

I remember where that part is.

They're telling me that I know where that part of the Powder River is.

So I know where they came from or where they traveled through.

So this is like basically a way of communicating dramatically, theatrically, and an imitation of nature.

And it's something I think that I see in, like I've been helping these folks over in Canada in some of their opera and some of their theater where they're, and ballet, where they're using expression in sign language that I coached them.

And they're, but they're doing it sometimes in maybe European foundations, but they compliment it with indigenous.

And it's all telling a story with the body.

And it's so beautiful.

- I bet they really enjoy doing that too, don't they?

- They enjoy learning because we've been doing it for five years over there near North Battleford for a week.

And a lot of the people that are coming in are from theater groups.

And some of them are from schools because some of the people that were here today were here to consider the use of sign language to compliment language instruction and acquisition.

That's the diversity of its potential.

- A thing that I think would be attractive appealing to a student.

I went to college and had to learn a foreign language.

Maybe you had to do the same thing.

My mother always said, "Oh, you'll be good at that."

That was not my experience.

I struggled along and I ended up getting B in it and so forth because it was so tough to start.

But with what you're showing people, anyone can get started immediately with it and enjoy it and begin to understand what you're talking about.

And you don't have to download some software or link your phone to a device or buy a program or you can do this and begin to get it.

And it's fun.

- It is.

Some of us experience in the Western society, like I've got degrees, that sometimes learning was not to be fun, but naturally there are classes that I've taken that they were fun 'cause we were able, because of the approach and the method of instruction was user-friendly and not behavioristic or some authoritarian or based on some set rules or set practices.

No, this one, it's interactive and you learn while doing.

And then when I'm teaching this method, it's an art of teaching.

There are some considerations that people sometimes miss that aren't explained.

So I was over at Arapaho school and I wanted to mention the purpose of reinforcement and repetition.

I wanted to reinforce the point of implementing it, doing it, because sure, I can do a nice presentation to everybody and explain some of the background and maybe a brief part of the history of sign language.

They have to hold themselves accountable to do it.

So even today, as much as people thought it might be worthy, I was just entertainment.

I was entertaining them.

But if they wanted to reinforce it, they're going to have to take ownership and start doing what they can do in their own way and start utilizing this fine tuning of how they can adapt it.

Maybe networking and collaborating more to where we could bring in more teaching fundamentals of this that they didn't get to see or acknowledge like worldview.

Like some words are said from a worldview that sometimes people take for granted water, but in some people in different degrees of understanding the word water, there are ceremonial people that have a sort of a holistic, sort of a supernatural type of reference to water when they talk about it.

Some of them will have more of an idea of water just complimenting or partaking in something.

So this understanding in teaching is just an introduction.

They need more reinforcement where sometimes a blend in humor, blend in the worldview.

Like we don't say some certain things to elders, but we're gonna take this time to say it just to learn the word.

And then at the same time that it's part of geography and in some of that presentation, I associated name places here in Wyoming about geography using sign language.

- How much do we know about how it started, where it started, how did it spread?

What do we know about that?

- If we start to specify or rationalize or put into a linear perspective, we're trying to control the dynamics of this.

So that is out there.

But if we think on a human nature level, like I explained earlier that it's in our DNA, not just native people, but even yourself, 'cause when you were talking, you were using the word I know and I understand and I could see that you were talking about something all that is in your nature.

And so at some point in time in the Western civilization and the scientific method, they wanna deny the control of this environment because it is not following their rules.

And so we've been indoctrinated to these systems that we're not acknowledging natural systems.

So this is where we're at here, that if we put this in a linear rational control mechanism, in a natural clinical setting, we're taking basically trying to control it or sell it.

So the point there is that it's happening.

It can happen.

It works.

Why not use it?

And it's a natural.

- And not worry so much about who did it first or who taught it to who or how, because everybody was doing it.

- We're just looking at the effectiveness.

And so I can't say how far back in history, but you took the words out of my thoughts and said it was an ancient prehistoric language.

And it's within our anatomy and the patterns in our DNA and those strings somewhere along the line, they put that sign language, whether you choose to believe in a God or not, it's still part of the natural system of the world.

- Who are you?

Where are you from?

What do you want?

And here's who I am.

Here's what I want.

- I put a slide up there on a PowerPoint that the first Europeans noticed that like in 1536, that there was a great observation of people using sign language at that time.

And even in furthermore into 1600s.

And even when Lewis and Clark passed through the Missouri area and the Dakotas there and Maximilian, they were documenting the use of sign language among the indigenous people.

So that goes back way back in terms of the reference from US history.

But for us in world history, man, it goes back way back.

- Way, way back.

They were observing something in the 15th century that had been going on for many centuries prior to that.

- Certainly.

- It's an unplugged kind of way of communicating.

It's hard to misinterpret, I would think.

- The first thing we wanna keep in mind is what school are you coming from?

And the application of what you're gonna use in sign language.

If they're seeing different concepts of what's interpreting different signs, they might agree with it.

But then again, it might have not been the point they were trying to make.

And here is the really serious issue of what's going on in the history of Indian tribes.

They brought in people who were rudimentally familiar with some of the indigenous languages.

They understood plain sign language.

They had terms from the US ambassadors to set up treaties.

And they set these terms in contracts that they had no orientation in these indigenous civilizations.

No orientation to these words.

Somebody who could facilitate a translation didn't even know how to say some of this English because they were out there in a frontier.

They weren't in forums of politics and government and in history and legal environments.

They were with the challenge to interpret it in a sign.

And so when they interpreted them, plus they were on the take, they were given all kinds of money to say, "Hey, you're gonna translate what they're gonna say.

"And this is what we want."

They were creating dialogue that may not have meant what it was supposed to mean.

Because that translator was an agent.

He couldn't translate some of those terms, let alone knowing himself.

And the only thing he knew was rudimentary, maybe Arapaho or Crow.

And these legal terms, he didn't know what they were, but he knew some rudimentary sign languages.

And the challenge today is that whether these treaties are valid or not.

They might've been subjected if somebody wanted to revisit that.

Because that was the medium that they had to use at that time.

And there was no orientation to the literacy of that legalese in that contract.

- So it was difficult enough, even if you didn't have some ulterior motive or an agenda of your own.

And if you admit, if you add that to it, recipe for a real mess.

As you understand the sign language, did it have enough?

Was there enough there in the language itself that a better agent, a better outside agent could have been made to understand?

Was that part of it?

- I can't say that because I can't make it a determination.

I could make an analysis of that.

If given the opportunity to have an orientation onto the word capital, this is what this means.

But you're looking at somebody that's coming from a naturalistic type of background.

It's really complicated.

- More complicated than we might think.

I hope people here today found value in what you did.

- I hope so too.

- I think they enjoyed it, if nothing else.

And that's a good introduction to learning.

To me, learning is, a key to it is, I wanna keep going.

I wanna know what the next thing is.

Dr.

Lanny Real Bird, thanks for being with us on "Wyoming Chronicle."

- Good, thank you.

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